Two researchers send a text message using vodka

But it's far from the first text message enabled by alcohol.

Two researchers at York University have worked out a way to communicate between two points using vodka evaporated into the air. They used their system to message the lyrics of “O Canada” between two points, leading them to conclude that in times of need, when there is no cellular reception, it would be possible to text-message using this system.

The authors of the paper, published Thursday, used specific concentration levels of the vodka to represent bits 1 and 0. They wafted the “message” across 12 feet in the lab to the receiving unit, which read out the message as it detected the concentration of vodka in the air rising or falling over time.

The process sounds slow and short-range, but the researchers suggest that it could work for closed environments that don’t have the benefit of a cellular or Wi-Fi signal. They cite the example of the clogged London sewer system as one where robots could have been deployed below ground and have relayed their findings via the molecular communication system.

A third researcher quoted by Eurekalert further suggests that similar systems of molecular communication could be “used to communicate on the nanoscale,” when scientists are, for instance, trying to target drugs or cancer cells inside a human body.

If only the "My martini is low, fix me another" signal would reach the bartender before I have to shout. But seriously, this is nice but has several major flaws. It's temporal, meaning you need a clocking mechanism for it to be meaningful, since a steady concentration could mean a series of "ones" or you've saturated the local atmosphere. There's a likelihood for signal-to-noise issues with your detector, depending on specificity and purity of the chemicals. Still, cool implications for engineering molecular communication channels.

Incremental upgrade: use concentrations of several different, equally volatile, molecules to go from base 2 to a higher base. If they got really fancy, they could construct long-form messages using DNA or some other polymer and try find a way to make that message disperse through the air as effectively as alcohol.

In all seriousness, while it's interesting that they found a way to do this using a chemical (versus optical) sensor, it IS hard to imagine environments where this would make any sense over... pretty much any other method of communication. Particularly given the necessary challenges and problems of any aerosolized communication method. Despite their proposed example.

Personally, I can't think of a "regular scale" situation where radio, optical, or ultrasonic wouldn't work better than this. It might have uses at a smaller (micro) scale.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I thought smoke signals were visual? This is a molecular communication - likely alcohol was used because of the ease of detection?

This is fascinating and very applicable. Each different chemical used could be a different channel/thread of info. A potpourri of information could have an incredibile amount of bandwidth, if not speed. Think big, slow pipe - also you wouldn't have to worry as much about interference... or overloading antennae.

I.e. you would cover an area with a network and it doesn't matter how many units are "logging on", bandwidth remains the same.

You have to wonder how much real work is getting done in labs at this time of year. Perhaps journals should start attaching a warning to articles published after December 15: "Warning! This research in this article may have been conducted while pie-eyed, pickled, and/or potted!"

(Not sure if this will be taken in the right 'spirit'. Anyway, here goes)

Since this seems to be a mechanism using the olfactory senses, how about *ahem* letting some natural gases do their work across the room? You save on precious alcohol. And you get to put your bean lunches to good use.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I thought smoke signals were visual? This is a molecular communication - likely alcohol was used because of the ease of detection?

This is fascinating and very applicable. Each different chemical used could be a different channel/thread of info. A potpourri of information could have an incredibile amount of bandwidth, if not speed. Think big, slow pipe - also you wouldn't have to worry as much about interference... or overloading antennae.

I.e. you would cover an area with a network and it doesn't matter how many units are "logging on", bandwidth remains the same.

If you meant my smoke signals reference, it was more tongue in cheek due to the underlying similarities.

And even if you used a multi channel approach, there are serious flaws in trying to do anything with any notable distance. And you'll still get less bandwidth than... well... pretty much anything else (all of the other communications mediums I mentioned are easily capable of multi-channel/broadband communication).

Intracellular communications have been using this for a long time. A neuronal synapse is triggered by concentrations of agonist molecules reaching a threshold which causes a reaction in the afferent neuron. The neurons then acts to reduce the concentration of agonist, typically either through active reuptake of the agonist molecule or by releasing enzymes to degrade it into inactive components. The very same concentration based communication technique.